


sprinkle coal dust on my grave

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:41:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13556133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Do me a favor, Raylan doesn’t say, walking towards an old church, walking into Boyd Crowder’s arms flung wide.





	sprinkle coal dust on my grave

**Author's Note:**

> Just more thoughts I had on the finale and all that comes before. Boyd asks if Raylan's the angriest man in the world, and I thought, "How would Boyd know Winona said that to Raylan?" And then my brain wandered off into all the times they must talk off screen, and all the things they don't say. Runs along with occasional mention to events in various seasons. Title from ["Sprinkle Coal Dust on My Grave."](https://www.loc.gov/folklife/LP/SongsBituminous_L60.pdf)

It begins when Boyd’s in prison. The second time Boyd Crowder goes inside, that is, though neither of them counts the first time. Neither of them counts the time Raylan was gone, any more than a tree counts the lean years scarred into its rings.

Well, maybe it don’t quite begin there. Maybe it’s a few days before, maybe it’s –

 _Do me a favor_ , Raylan doesn’t say, walking towards an old church, walking into Boyd Crowder’s arms flung wide.

(Boyd’s never done a damn thing for anybody that wasn’t paying, including his kin. Of course, Boyd’s always been cleverer than anyone else in Harlan, has ways of collecting on his debts that don’t involve gold or green.)

Raylan refuses to flinch, but Raylan’s cool has never been any match for Boyd’s, and he winds up paying all the same.

Raylan needs Boyd to come to Lexington to stand in a line-up, and Boyd comes. Boyd asks Raylan to dinner, and it ain’t like Raylan could stay away.

Raylan visits Boyd in the prison hospital the next day, and it’s just to pass the time until he can transport Dewey Crowe. It’s Boyd who needs the favor, then, _did you miss on purpose?_ and Raylan repays him in kind.

Raylan only visits Boyd because he needs information on Harlan, on Arlo, on who might want to shoot Ava in her marriage bed. (He pays, of course. He lists his sins and considers his soul and finally throttles Boyd the way he’s been angling for since the very first. Boyd’s always taken great pleasure in banking on Raylan's rage.) It don’t mean nothing that sometimes Raylan stays a little longer, that sometimes he means to hang up the prison phone and instead finds himself asking, “You saved any sinners today?” or “They ever come by with that mint for your pillow?” or “Did you know I was married, once? She’s living here in Lexington now, married to a realtor. She seems to think I’m the angriest man in the world. Said so herself. What do you think that means for the state of my immortal soul?”

It’s only a way to pass the time. Raylan’s got nothing waiting for him, back at the motel, nothing except a bottle of bourbon and occasionally Ava Crowder in his bed.

Raylan comes the day they let Boyd go free, lets Boyd know that Raylan’s paid this and Boyd owes him and Raylan’s got his handcuffs ready to collect.

He visits Boyd at the church camp, a regular Vacation Bible School for felons, but he only goes because he’s looking for fugitives and looking to lock Boyd back up and looking for answers when a meth trailer blows sky high. He doesn’t stay for dinner. Boyd takes his payment out of Raylan’s dwindling patience, and Raylan prays more than he has in thirty years.

Boyd comes to Raylan because he needs a favor, only means to call Raylan _friend_ the way Arlo called him _son_ , but at least Boyd ain’t trying to murder him for cash. Raylan doesn’t kill Arlo, even though he probably would have, if he’d driven from Lexington to Harlan with his daddy in the passenger seat. Instead, he spends five hours in a car with Boyd Crowder, talking about fatherly Gods and lost gods and failed fathers, blisters bleeding on Boyd’s palms and grave dirt on his jeans. Boyd talks, and Raylan listens, five hours and twenty years that he’s missed, left at a dead run with powder burns still fresh on Boyd’s palms and coal dust ground into their knees.

Raylan doesn’t shoot Boyd either, even though he knows he should.

Boyd needs a favor and doesn’t know it, but Raylan keeps him from shooting the woman and saves his life, walks away before Boyd can find a way to make him pay for the kindness.

It goes on like that. In prison the inmates suspected Boyd of snitching to the law. Outside of prison everyone makes the same assumptions: Doyle Bennett and Quarles and Nicky Augustine and AUSA Vasquez thinking Raylan’s dirtied his hands with Boyd.

(Raylan has dirtied his hands, of course, right alongside Boyd Crowder, diving in and out mineshafts since they were fourteen and stupid, snatching shards out of abandoned mines. He’s got the black scars across his knuckles to prove it. They dug coal together, after all.)

They don’t ask for favors. Asking implies that the answer could be no. Raylan shows up to save Dewey from the Bennetts. Boyd arrives just in time to save Raylan from Dickie’s choked up swing. Boyd visits Raylan at the station, and Raylan visits Boyd in prison. He only visits to let Boyd know that Raylan’s onto his game. He means to hang up, finds himself instead talking about how Winona’s pregnant, talking about children and fathers and how he swore he’d never come back to Kentucky, how he swore he’d never bring a child into this life. He don’t talk for five hours, because he ain’t the one who’s in love with six-syllable words and the sound of his own voice.

Boyd listens. It’s a way to pass the time.

Raylan gets Boyd out of jail. For assault, that time. Then Raylan gets Boyd out of Napier’s clutches. Art doesn’t much care for it. “That’s three times in the last year you’ve gotten Boyd Crowder _out_ of prison, when I specifically recall asking you to put him _in_.” Rachel says she’s not surprised they think Raylan’s dirty, not when he keeps treating Kentucky like his own personal Monopoly board and getting Boyd Crowder — “I suppose he’d be the mouth,” she says — out of jail for free. Tim says something about Raylan and Boyd Crowder’s mouth that Raylan doesn’t see fit to repeat.

He tells Boyd what Tim’s said, the next time, and Boyd laughs and laughs and laughs. It’s the cheapest Boyd’s ever come, and if Boyd’s taking payment in dirty jokes and easy laughter, Raylan can’t say he minds the fee.

They go looking for Drew Thompson and wind up in the hills and headed for the last mineshaft they’ll ever see. Raylan means to let them kill Boyd, then. Boyd deserves it. Boyd’s running drugs and killing folks and running a whorehouse on the side, and Cope’s offered Raylan a surefire way to bring Boyd down.

Boyd’s killing preacher boys, now. He confesses that to Raylan when they’re sitting in the dark, leaning against old corrugated tin and passing the time. Raylan don’t gather up Boyd’s sins and fold them away, the way Boyd collects on Raylan’s past and the bruises that linger, rotten, under his ribs. Boyd’s clenched jaw and dark eyes when he talks about snakes and the poison of faith are hardly worth the price of his life.

Raylan saves it, all the same. Does it again a few weeks later, when a man dressed like a sheriff tries to shoot them all down. Boyd tucks himself behind Raylan while it happens, and that’s enough. Sometimes Raylan doesn’t mind being paid with pieces of Boyd Crowder’s pride.

Raylan drives from Louisville to Harlan, three hours the way he’s driving, passes through Lexington just to pick up Boyd Crowder and his truck and head north again. It’s only two hours and change, this time, since nobody’s driving on back roads to cabins in the hills. This time they don’t talk about God. They talk about Raylan’s dead daddy, because Boyd can’t resist. They talk about love and Raylan’s unborn daughter and the things a man has to do if he ever hopes to get a good night’s sleep.

It passes the time.

They talk about love, and Boyd offers his hand and Raylan gives him a gun and it ain’t entirely clear who’s asking for the favor and who’s getting paid. Nicky Augustine dies and Boyd drives Raylan back to Harlan, turns on the radio and drives ninety, his foot tapping the whole way. They don’t say another word about love, but Boyd pulls into the bar and looks over at Raylan, says, “She’ll be safe now, Raylan,” and it’s clear he ain’t talking about his fiancée or Raylan’s ex-wife, and Raylan lets Boyd go without asking about the hurry he’s in.

Wade Messer dies and Raylan doesn’t manage to put Boyd in prison for it, though he likes to think he tries. Art nearly dies and Rachel rolls her eyes at Raylan when he swears it wasn’t Boyd.

Boyd wouldn’t be dumb enough to shoot the Chief Marshal. Boyd wouldn’t shoot Art, and he wouldn’t give up Raylan’s baby girl to thugs from Detroit, but, oh, he’d aim Arlo at Raylan every chance he got and wait for Raylan to bleed.

Boyd doesn’t quite help them get Daryl Crowe, but somehow they still wind up discussing their respective lists of sins and the state of the scales of justice. Neither of them mentions their immortal souls, but Boyd’s shied away from faith and God and forgiveness since his daddy slaughtered his flock, even more so after loosing the serpent into a preacher boy’s tent.

“Help us get Boyd Crowder,” Rachel offers. She’s sincere. She needs his help, Raylan knows. He leaves Kentucky and there’s no one left who can nail Boyd’s sins into his hands and bring him in. Of course, just because she and Vasquez need his help, it doesn’t mean they don’t both believe Raylan’s been in Boyd’s pocket all along.

They don’t know how not to ask for favors, up in Lexington. They’ve never shimmied into an abandoned mineshaft, two dumb boys with a rope and a flashlight and not a single goddamn lick of sense, wandering through the cracked sternum of Harlan looking for shards of coal.

The only way Raylan’s ever going to be rid of Boyd Crowder is to shoot him. Tim shrugs, says, “I thought you’d tried that and missed,” and then goes back to chewing on the toothpick he stole from Art’s stash instead of riling Raylan up further and grinning bloody in the aftermath of Raylan’s fists.

Nobody ever plays Raylan like Boyd does. Nobody ever tries. (Well, maybe that ain’t quite true. Winona spent most of the last year of their marriage trying to rile Raylan up, searching for bruises under his skin. She just couldn’t pinpoint them the way Boyd always has, didn’t know enough to aim for the rotten spots and grin. Nobody’s ever mapped Raylan out like Boyd has, carved the lines on Raylan’s palms with coal shards, past present and future, dust to dust.)

Raylan can put Boyd away, no matter what Rachel and Vasquez think. He just needs Boyd to do something wrong. That’s where Avery Markham comes in. Markham opens the safe and Boyd’s eyes gleam.

Nobody ever plays Boyd like Raylan does. Ava offers him the pride and the pleasure of a charming, beautiful woman on his arm and in his bed. Duffy offers him a duchy in an empire, running drugs for Detroit and no need to be any smarter than Boyd's daddy was, doing the same thing years before Boyd was nothing but a twinkle in his eye. Somebody offers to let Boyd rob a bank, and they’re clever, doing that, but Raylan has Markham open the safe.

Raylan offers Boyd the chance to prove he’s smarter than Markham and the marshals and all their daddies combined, puts the trap in plain sight and dangles the bait.

Things don’t quite go as planned. The preponderance of the evidence — their entire lives, cradle to grave — suggests that neither of them tend to learn from the past. Ava had shot the man who put a ring on her finger, and then she’d tried to shoot Boyd. Smarter men might have realized she’d be willing to do either of those things again.

 _I gave you everything you wanted_ , Ava tells Raylan, does him the favor he didn’t ask for, grants the wish he didn’t make. All Raylan has to do is let Boyd die.

Raylan calls 911. He puts pressure on Boyd’s chest, and that’s familiar, too, Boyd Crowder’s blood pooling under his hands and over his scars. Raylan talks about Willa’s heart murmur. He talks about how much she wiggles, when he holds her, how fragile she seems and how terrified he is to have her in his arms. It passes the time, covers the sound of Boyd choking for air until the ambulance comes.

Then Raylan goes after Ava. He doesn’t appreciate getting favors he ain’t requested, didn’t much like the price he’d almost paid.

Of course, Ava’s owed much more from both of them, a debt the entire county couldn’t repay.

Boyd doesn’t die and Raylan’s still in Harlan, still has blood on his hands and is still a man with a long list of sins, with a file at least as thick as Boyd’s, and he’s never going to be anything else as long as Boyd’s alive. Killing Boyd Crowder is the only way to cut Raylan loose of a past he can’t manage to leave behind.

 _I need a favor_ , Raylan doesn’t say, finds Boyd and Ava in the cabin and kicks over a loaded gun. Boyd picks up the gun. They’ve never asked each other for any favors, but they’ve paid debts and collected on them and neither of them has ever refused.

Raylan needs to kill Boyd, and Boyd picks up the gun.

He asks for a few moments, for a last question, pays for it with the asking and Raylan nods.

Raylan grants him this. Boyd’s supposed to reciprocate, and pull.

He doesn’t pull. _I just did what I thought you would do_ , Ava answers, and Boyd looks at Raylan, looks at the clenched line of his jaw and the scars on his knuckles and the hand over his gun, looks at Raylan’s past and his present and his future, and he shakes his head.

Boyd left Ava in jail to save his own skin, and she repaid him in kind.

 _Are you the angriest man in the world?_ Boyd asks Raylan, a question he asked years before, back when he’d still had his daddy and his God and his main concern appeared to be how Raylan’s immortal soul would fare on Judgment Day.

Raylan wouldn’t lose any sleep over killing Boyd. Wouldn’t cross any lines he hasn’t crossed before, walking away from the car and leaving Nicky Augustine inside. Wouldn’t raise his daughter up any differently, if he walked away from that cabin having shot Boyd Crowder dead.

He tells Boyd that, when they’re driving from the prison to the courthouse for Boyd’s trial, Ava long gone. Raylan narrates the eulogy he’s planned for Boyd’s funeral, complete with a tip of his new hat, and Boyd laughs and laughs.

They both have to go to the trial. Talking’s just a way to pass the time.

There’s no favors for Boyd to do him, after that. Raylan’s in Miami and Boyd don’t know shit about Miami criminals and he don’t know where Ava’s gone and he sure as hell don’t know the first thing about raising up a sun-kissed, Floridian little girl. Neither does Raylan. But Willa learns her numbers and the alphabet and how to bat her eyelashes and flash her dimples and get her ice cream for free, and Raylan thinks Boyd Crowder couldn’t have taught her any better than that.

So Raylan doesn’t visit. Doesn’t plan to see Boyd Crowder ever again. Raylan can pretend Boyd’s dead, from Miami, even if he looks at the coal scars on his hands and the blood soaked into his palms and knows Boyd Crowder’s alive like he knows the beat of his own heart.

But then he needs Boyd to believe that Ava’s gone. That’s all. Then there’s the parole hearing that Raylan has to attend. And the bank robbers working their way up the Florida coast to the mountains, clever but not so clever that Raylan can’t bring them in. Even if he has to pay a little time, flying to Kentucky, it’s worth it when there’s a case to solve. Raylan’s got things to do, and sometimes those things bring a man back to a prison in Kentucky, even if it’s the last place he’d like to be. That’s all there is. Everything else they say — every time Boyd lays out Raylan’s past, prodding at the bruises Boyd knows haven’t healed; every picture Raylan holds up to the glass, Willa dancing and laughing in a hundred videos on his phone; every time they don’t ask any favors or brook any talk about forgiveness or faith or love or the state of anyone’s immortal soul –

Well, Raylan’s got nothing waiting on him at home, and there are worse ways to pass the time.


End file.
